Falter
by loveliness decays
Summary: For Naruto is ragged, imperfect, honest as the earth - and beautiful enough to make Itachi, a god himself, falter. ItaNaru drabble.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own Naruto.

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><p><strong>Falter<strong>

He is lovely when he is calm, gentle with the light that washes over the foamy waves at dawn. He is the light that men see once in a lifetime, sometimes less. They covet his smile, which is all soft curves and no hard edges. They waste away for his wide eyed glances, his feathery touches, his love.

They reach out for him, moved by spells from which they do not wish to break free; they cannot live without the flutter that beats in them like a hummingbird's wings when he laughs his silvery, tinkling laugh. They would die without it.

He is the wise man's folly. He could break anyone with his sea blue eyes.

But he breaks too - and when he breaks, he breaks fantastically. Yes, he is lovely when he is calm. His laughing smile is what makes the birds in the sky sing, what makes the sun rise. But when he is angry, kissing him is like splintering fire. He is powerful in those moments - too powerful to ever wish to caress, flashing scarlet in the dark.

Itachi does so anyway, grasps his scarred shoulders with equally scarred hands and whispers sweet, dangerous nothings, liking how others gape but do not attempt to touch his fiery love, too awed by what they realise (but never accept) they cannot have.

Itachi is a god amongst gods, but still he marvels at how Naruto's angry breaths calm at his touch if only he wishes it. He holds the power that shinobi envy in his eyes - but he finds it far more remarkable that he holds the beauty that everyone envies in his hands.

Since before he could remember, he has been showered in splendour and luxury, handed handsome things from each corner of the earth, tasted all that each culture could ever offer.

He was not yet five summers old when he was taught of the stiff, unforgiving beauty in perfection. Perfection is crisp, undeniable, never wrong - and an acquired taste. He learned how to admire formalities, how to admire without admiring, how to kill without murdering.

Honour. Honour that was bled away into nothingness when his parents bled away into nothingness. It was a false honour, frigid, rigid, that froze him to his centre (at that point, he could not call it a heart) that he did not regret losing. Its loss did not make him any less perfect; for it was not there to begin with, lost to him forever when he realised there was no way to kill without murdering.

He loved his clan. He lamented their loss, cried even - and acknowledged that he was a killer, a murderer, as all shinobi are.

They reviled, and continue to revile, him - but they ordered his family's death and they have murdered before. There is no moral high ground for them to glare him down from.

He should not keep his world, for it was built on the notion of that contrived honour. But his dead mother birthed him into this world, and so he was fated to live in it until his own death.

In his world, he has seen beautiful things. He has seen perfect things. He has pursued perfection, because perfection was the only sort of beauty there was_. _Perhaps when they trained him to live in this world, they meant for him to only pretend, but he breathed this, lived this act for so long, too long, and he choked on all the falsities on which his mind was built, even having becoming a perfect thing. Perhaps it is because there was no significance to begin with.

Then Naruto came.

Nothing he had seen before, beautiful or perfect or beautiful _and _perfect, has taken his breath away. But Naruto has.

He does not need anyone to tell him that Naruto is uncultured. He is a stranger to Itachi's world, where everyone chokes on their own breath or on their own blood. He does not understand how to play pretend to the point life is an act. He does not offer words he does not mean to offer and he accepts everything to be as it seems. He just breathes.

Itachi does not need anyone to tell him that he is everything that Itachi, the epitome of subtlety and refinement, is not - and he does not need anyone to tell him that he loves Naruto for it.

When Naruto came, he taught him that the grass is comes from the earth, not from plastic, the colours that swathe the morning sky are not paint but something beyond man; that fire burns truly, beyond the words of a jutsu.

No one has taught Naruto grace, nor would he have wished to learn, but he is wild with it. (His mother raised him with an appreciation for fine things.)

Itachi allows himself to think, as Naruto sleeps close to him (so trustingly close to him), that perhaps things do not have to be beautiful to be perfect – he has spent his life surrounding and filling himself with heavenly things, and he finds now that he has wasted his life, in his pursuit of perfect things...

For Naruto is ragged and imperfect, honest as the earth - and beautiful enough to make Itachi, a god himself, falter.

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><p>I found this randomly in my files and I'm pretty fond of it, so I fixed it up and ended up adding just about everything you see here. I love ItaNaru and I think I'm out of fics. Blah. I'm quite upset.<br>Reviews are appreciated; I don't know what to make of this myself. Nonetheless, I hope you liked it.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.  
><em>loveliness decays<em>


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